At its heart, there is a deceptively simple thesis fighting to escape from this book: Hannibal failed, not because of Italian loyalty to Rome, but because he could not overcome the local and regional power-struggles which characterised Italy throughout this period, and which therefore fatally hampered his chances of tipping the manpower balance in his favour or of sustaining his Italian campaign beyond the years immediately following Cannae. Readers may baulk at the 180 pages of dense case study at its core, but the reward is real.
The lengthy introductory chapter, besides setting out F.'s stall, discussing sources (can one use Livy? F. must, so a typical ‘middle’ way based upon common sense is adopted) and tracing the prior history of Rome's relations with the Italians, also includes a valuable overview of existing explanations for Hannibal's failure, which teachers may wish to hide from their students! The core of the book lies in four chapters (2–5) in which F. studies and describes in detail the course of Hannibal's efforts to induce revolt in each of four regions of southern Italy: Apulia, Campania, Bruttium and western Magna Graecia, and southern Lucania and eastern Magna Graecia. Together with Chapter 6, which provides a more rapid summary of the subsequent unwinding of those revolts across the four regions, this provides a very detailed account of the central theatre of the Hannibalic War between Cannae and Hannibal's departure from Italy in 203 b.c. (several appendices tease out some of the more obscure chronological and geographical problems). F. begins with Apulia, because it was the immediate focus, post-Cannae. The choice is logical, but it does his argument few favours, because the evidence for which states actually revolted in Apulia is minimal. This chapter is least dependent upon Livy, most reliant upon weaker sources and non-literary evidence, with mixed results.
The overall argument of the book requires that F. can show which states revolted and, if possible, why, within their local historical and political context. Key to the argument for every region is first the role of aspiring regional hegemons (Arpi, Capua, Locri, Taras, etc.), and second the consequences of the choices made by those states both for the actions of the lesser powers around them and for their local rivals. By the time we get to the end of Chapter 5 the case has been convincingly made, but at the outset the poverty of evidence in Chapter 2 rather works against F., and he is clearly tempted to build the desired construct regarding Arpi and its satellite states on a very fragile basis – here, the argument leads the evidence, rather than vice versa (illustrated all too clearly in the insistence on retaining a largely discredited coin-dating in the main text on p. 85, notwithstanding the honest concession of the revised date in the footnote). This is a pity, not least because the coin evidence adduced on pp. 87–8 supplements very effectively the core contribution of the chapter, which is the historical pattern of regional alliances traced in the table on p. 89 (compare p. 131 for Campania). Had this chapter followed the others, the implications would have been obvious to the reader without needing to force the evidence.
By contrast, Chapter 3, on Campania and the case of Capua, which is richly covered in Livy, proves a much more fruitful case study (F. himself admits this, p. 144), and it is hard not to recommend that readers begin with Chapter 3. Here F. can more readily illustrate the intuition of Chapter 2, that ‘the loyalty and defection of Apulian cities … can be explained, at least in part, by traditional local alliances and hostilities’ (p. 128). F. is in no sense dogmatic about this, allowing that in any particular instance local military and diplomatic conditions can bring about a political realignment, but F. brings out clearly that the loyalty of many states in Campania to Rome, notwithstanding the revolt of Capua and the aftermath of Cannae, owed much to local rivalries with Capua. Indeed, this chapter foregrounds F.'s principal (apparent) paradox, that Hannibal's greatest success, winning over Capua, simultaneously confirmed many other states on the Roman side and was his ultimate undoing.
Readers could usefully skip at this point to the first part of Chapter 6, where F. very convincingly demonstrates the consequences of this ‘checkerboard pattern of alliances’ for the long-term resolution of Roman and Carthaginian strategy in the war. This is particularly clear in the case of Campania, again, where F. offers a clear and effective account of the dilemmas faced by Hannibal, constantly on the back foot, trying to protect his allies from the numerically superior Roman forces, while the morale of the Capuans steadily ebbs away. The subsequent discussion of the fate of eastern Magna Graecia reveals one limitation in the overall analysis: much effort is expended in Chapter 5 trying to explain both why Thurii eventually aligned with Taras (contrary to their more traditional rivalry) and why Thurii in turn held out for longer than Taras. It becomes very clear in Chapter 6 (p. 269) that if Thurii is instead considered alongside its immediate neighbours to the West, in Bruttium (Chapter 4), the pattern of behaviour is far more comprehensible. In other words, as so often, arbitrary regionalisation can constrain analysis.
The final chapter (7) pulls things together convincingly. The element of real value lies in the use of some concepts from International Relations theory (p. 281), notwithstanding the earlier rather cursory nod in the introduction towards Arthur Eckstein's recent application of realist IR theory to Roman Republican imperialism. F.'s achievement is the identification of patterns of enduring rivalries within Italy (e.g. Naples and Capua, Taras and Thurii, Locri and Rhegion), which strongly influence subsequent political choices (and specifically, choices during the Hannibalic War). These need not prevent alternatives, but they have a key role to play. F. acknowledges, in turn, that such enduring rivalries pose a problem for realist IR theory, which prioritises rationality and leaves ‘little room for other considerations to shape foreign policy’, such as past history (p. 285); F. resolves this, explicitly after Eckstein, by emphasising ‘the primitive nature of ancient diplomacy and policy-making’ (p. 286), meaning that fear, mistrust and the past take on a greater role in calculations. One does wonder at what point this in fact shades over in to irrationality, and so poses a rather greater challenge to the realist model. Calling ancient diplomacy ‘primitive’ has worrying echoes of the ancient economy debate; it is a pity that F. does not engage with the wider debates of IR theory (dare one suggest that there is a certain amount of ‘bandwagoning’ going on here, Eckstein in the role of hegemon …?), since one cannot help but wonder whether constructivist IR might here have offered useful alternatives (within the Roman sphere, compare now P. Burton, Friendship and Empire [2011]). For all that, the model is of genuine value and interest, not least with the suggestion (p. 285) that this sort of enduring interstate rivalry might help explain Roman–Samnite conflict without recourse to Harris's model of constantly aggressive imperialism.
The counterpart to this explanation of Hannibal's failure is F.'s concluding attempt to explain why Rome, by contrast succeeded. The banal answer is that Rome had more time (although it also serves to explain in part why it took Rome so long); the more interesting one is that it is precisely through the increasing frequency of elite connections that these regional enduring rivalries were eventually undermined. The Social War is called in support of this, since the level of interstate cooperation amongst Rome's allies attested to by the Social War revolt is precisely what was lacking at the time of the Hannibalic War. We are thereby returned to the view that the Hannibalic War was the pivotal moment in Rome's relations with the Italian allies – but the reasoning is novel, it was pivotal because of the way it disrupted and rebalanced regional alliances and rivalries.
